What is the future of “Pensado’s Place.” Do you have a definite plan, an indefinite plan?

I see it having a definite future. I may hand it off to someone else, but as long as people care, it’ll still be on. It’s all about hanging with my friends. I’ve always envisioned the show having an importance – it might morph, it might change just like our industry changes and our profession of mixing has changed.

Mixing in 2011 is 60 percent different than mixing in the 90s. I’ll have people on the show to help us feel into the future – it’s how to make a living – it’s how to learn – it’s a broad, almost impossible task, but it’s fun.

What people don’t know is that I don’t allow the show to be edited. It’s live because that’s who we [my guest’s and I] are. Only time there would be an edit is if a guest said something that he later thought was uncomfortable.

Pensado’s Place is really much more than Dave Pensado. You have a great team. Herb is fantastic.

I’ve known Herb 20 years, just being in his presence is fun for me. I think if you look at the guests and the interaction with Herb and I – they all start out a little nervous and then settle in. I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished starting out with nothing.

Now the show takes 20 people. If you add up all the views on YouTube, and all the episodes everywhere they’re viewed, we’re probably going to hit – well, a lot of views. I couldn’t put it together without Will and Herb, and Ryan, Ben and Ian. I get the glory but they do the real leg work. My wife filters through the questions.

I’m sure you get a lot of emails and comments.

I get about 300 emails – I don’t have time to respond every time someone contacts me. So, to everyone reading this, know that even if I don’t respond, I read every single email.

You were once quoted saying that mixing R&B is more challenging than rock. The sound of rock seems to have adopted a lot of pop trends, influenced by hip-hop. Do you feel rock mixing has changed? How so? Is it still easier?

I still stand by that statement. However, when I first made the statement, I assumed that people would print the rest of what I said! To clarify, the difference is that in the rock world, all of the effort to get quality is in the tracking.

In the R&B world, everything is left for mixing. Tracking for R&B is just “get it to tape” – it’s a fix-in-the-mix philosophy, but in a lot of Pop, mixing is an integral part of the production. What I mean, is the producer is creating sounds, he’s mixing as he goes. When I get an R&B or Pop record in, the session has plugins on every track; he mixed as he went. Then I have to sort through all of that and pick it apart.

On the rock side, it’s rare that I get plugins on the tracks because the information is in the live capture. An incredible skill and talent has gone into getting the tracking right on the way in. I personally think the most intricate skill is required for tracking, a good tracking engineer can rival the best mixing engineer.

Having said that, as to which is harder, I’m totally capable of screwing up either; they require different skill sets. The one thing that I’ve always maintained a great mixer should do is find the energy, the emotion, and what makes the song unique. Manny kind of went into that a bit, and I was mesmerized listening to his answers. At the end of the day mixing is not manipulation of sound – it’s emotion.

Very early in my career, I think I’d been engineering for three weeks, I did a bagpipe album for the top bagpiper in the world – it sounded like someone stomping through a field of cats. It was difficult to wrap my head around because when I EQ’d it (to smooth out the sound) the whole sound went away.

So I accepted it and just turned to the playing. The album was well received – turns out that figuring out the emotion is what made it successful.

Our job is to ease the pain a bit in our culture. Even not so esoterically, what people remember is the emotion and the feeling they get from a song. Therein lies the secret to selling records, and perhaps why we’re not selling records now.